September 6, 2010

You know how colleges are always putting pictures on their websites and brochures to show how diverse they are, even Photoshopping in some diversity if they don't have any handy? A reader called my attention to these pictures on the home page of a large university. As you'll notice, they are all just a bunch of white people.

31 comments:

persona au gratin
said...

The Mexican government is hilariously hypocritical. If or when America descends into barbarity or civil war, they will be kicking themselves for contributing to it. Hard to believe they won't feel it big time.

Apropos of nothing, this long article in the American Spectator covers every single one of your "obsessions", except for race of course.

The Instituto Tecnológico de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey is a private university with at least a dozen major campuses all over Mexico (not just Monterrey). Tuition is not cheap, the degrees are prestigious (though not among the most prestigious in the country), and the institution forms an important part of the national civic life.

While it is fairly white, it's not as white as those photos. I've never seen any university in Mexico be that white. Those photos are chosen for the same reason telenovela stars are white; white skin is prestigious in Mexico.

If you look at who attends and works in the most prestigious institutions in the nation like the UNAM and the IPN, you will find mostly mestizos in every shade of golden brown. Those schools don't charge tuition but do require high test scores to enter. Those tests are not race normed or subject to elaborate "extracurricular" and "teacher evaluation" schemes to achieve the right social and racial balance. And since those schools don't charge the prices that only white elites can afford like ITESM the actual cross section of merit attends.

I wish our best schools could live up to the ideals of the Mexican system. That will never happen.

US universities include more dark faces than they have on campus, and Mexican universities include more whites than they have. Regression to the mean?Mexicans surely are a hypocritical bunch. Whilst everybody there wants to be white, in the US, they all talk and act as if whites need to go. Why don't these people just make peace with their skin color instead of giving whites a hard time for being pale?

No hypocrisy on Mexico's part. Just white folk sending the dark folk north, and telling the neighbors to thank them for it. Think Liberia. Mexican immigration would likely pose few troubles, being as Yankee- Americans are less racist than Latin Americans, if we only had the heart to execute the drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and pimps.

OK, so I get your point, but what's the big deal? Hasn't it already been well-established that fair skin and European features are regarded as prestigious almost everywhere in the world except places where they actually predominate?

Nor do I see why this is some sort of "gotcha" moment. Everybody knows that middle-class Mexicans are whiter than working-class and poor Mexicans (although not as white as the pictures suggest) and that it's the latter groups who are emigrating to the US.

In other words, Steve, you're just setting up a straw man that nobody would seriously disagree with, including 111 million Mexicans. It feels mean-spirited. Pick on the La Raza racists in the US, sure, but why pick on Mexicans who are just being Mexican, staying at home and thriving?

The site does have an english version. Note that they use a British flag to denote that, rather than a US flag. Of course, being British, Im fine with that, but it seems odd with Mexico being right next door.

He resides in the obscenely affluent, lily white enclave of Preston Hollow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preston_Hollow,_Dallas,_Texas here in Dallas. His immediate next door neighbor is Tom Hicks, former owner of the Texas Rangers.

As others have noted, the Mexicans crossing into the US seem browner than most Mexicans. Are there studies to confirm or refute this?

During my vacations to the touristy parts of Mexico, it is certainly obvious that the natives who deal with the tourists (hotel desk personnel, waiters in the better restaurants, business executives) are whiter than the average Angeleno.

On the flip side, I once took the city bus from San Jose to downtown Cabo, which stops at all the hotels along the tourist strip picking up the hotel workers. All of them were scrawny, dark people, old before their time, lifetime resignation already etched on their faces. And yes, they look Indian, not white.

"OK, so I get your point, but what's the big deal? Hasn't it already been well-established that fair skin and European features are regarded as prestigious almost everywhere in the world except places where they actually predominate?"

But it hasn't been well-established in the minds of the American political class that Mexicans tend to aspire to whiteness. Only in America are Mexicans bribed with preferential treatment for identifying as not white, which is a disastrous policy for Republicans, but they don't realize that.

An egregious case of university photoshopping in the US that I saw occur was where a postdoc who I knew, who was Italian, was turned into what appeared to be a dark-skinned Hispanic. In the unmanipulated picture, a white man was looking into a microscope, a "scholarly" picture that had been used in one of his department's web images. Yet a year or so later, a university pamphlet that came out showed the same picture but the whole picture had been turned darker brown, and the guy came out looking like a Guatemalan. Some of the more distinguishing features of his face, such as his nose, were now hidden by the shadow of the microscope, and his skin, like the microscope itself, had become deep brown. Interestingly, the original had disappeared from not only the departmental website, but I could not find it anywhere online anymore either. I guess we just can't have white men being scientists in the 21st century.....

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